My inquiry question for my second inquiry project of the semester is “How does one lose themselves in group settings due to deindividuation?”. I chose this question, as I find it so hard to believe how many people change their personalities, morals and personal responsibilities when they are in group settings, adopting a mob mentality.
When I was completing a summer project, I was reading a bit of information about psychology and neuroscience, as the study of the brain is of interest to me. I read a chapter about the topic of deindividuation. I was very intrigued by this topic as it refers to human tendency to lose self awareness and individual identity in group settings, leading to impulsive and unmoral actions. In my second blog post, I will go into more detail of this subject, but one story in this chapter shocked me.
It was a story on the multiple suicide attempts in New York City, 10 of those attempts, crowds had gathered around the individual on a tall building. Because of the fact that it was late at night, there was a big crowd, where individuals felt anonymous, multiple people started chanting “jump”. Soon the whole crowd joined in, encouraging the individual to fall to their death. If these people were alone, or asked about what they would do in that situation, most people would not do the same thing. Since they were in a big crowd, far away from the individual, they loss sense of morality, adopting rather anonymity and a loss of accountability. The individuals were all baited into encouraging the person to jump, rather than following their ethics of encouraging safety.
After reading this story, I did extra research on this topic and found out that it is also the reason behind cyberbulling, as people believe they are wearing a mask concealing their identity and therefore making their actions justifiable. I want to do my inquiry question this semester on deindividuation as I believe it affects human brains and behaviour more than we realize and I want to find a way to explain why this happens, and possible ways to stop it’s impact.
